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A Tribe Called Quest Sign Off With Protest Music for Fractured Times

Rap canon is dominated by records that are easy to talk about. If you’ve taken a basic lit crit class, you can speak more or less lucidly about how G Rap or Nas or Andre or Kendrick is a Great Artist. It’s tougher to articulate—or at least, to articulate in quote-unquote “objective” ways—why snap music worked, or why ODB was so magnetic, or why Scarface mastered the craft in a way Eminem never did.

To combat this, some people who instinctively get that Gucci Mane is a great artist, for example, mount arguments that focus solely on wordplay, or project weird authorial intents onto homonymous slang. It’s well-intentioned, but it doesn’t do anything to expand the ways in which a broader audience thinks about rap music.

Earlier this month, the surviving members of A Tribe Called Quest dropped We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service. It’s the group’s first album since 1998’s The Love Movement—and their first since Phife Dawg passed away this March.

At the risk ofplagiarizing myself, Phife “rapped in the here and now, as if the Minnie Riperton was being chopped up right in front of you. Some rappers are historians, some are fatalists. Some—including Q-Tip, to be sure—float through time with no regard for its rules, skipping into the past or the future as they see fit. In that sense, he and Phife were perfect foils for one another. Two kids got a time machine, and one stayed behind to hold the fort.”

Skip to Sept. 1998. The Love Movement arrives on the same day as Aquemini, the same day as Hard Knock Life and the Black Star album. Instead of the genre-bending masterpiece, the ascendent superstar record, or the return to the essence, Tribe, in many eyes, fails to learn the lessons of 1996’s Beats, Rhymes, and Life. The water is finally above their heads.

Back to ‘96:

Yo I was riding the trainAnd this Puerto Rican kid said, simple and plain: ‘Let’s battle’It kinda took me by surprise‘Cause the brother was moving with his eyes on the prizeI said ‘Screw it, I ain’t got nothing to lose,But I got to do this shit real quick so, umm, hurry up kidBust your joints and then I’ll bust mineAnd I’ll be out, because I gotta see this hottie’He said ‘Okay, yo check it, check it outBlahblahblahblah,’ That’s what he saidThen I came back and just fucked up his head.

Q-Tip isn’t fucking around here, A. because he has to get Uptown to his girl, B. because in 1996, he is one of the greatest rappers on the face of the Earth, and C. because he is also probably getting a little insecure. Both he and Phife anchor their verses on “Phony Rappers” with the insistence that just because they’re on television doesn’t mean they’re not hard.

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“Phony Rappers” ends up being a phenomenal song, but the fact that it leads off Beats, Rhymes, and Life is a clear statement of purpose for their post-prime career. When some scoffed at that—because they missed the Native Tongues sound, because they didn’t like Consequence, whatever—Tribe’s tonal about-face on The Love Movement read as a weak capitulation, even if it was a natural next step for a versatile group.

In reality, The Love Movement is a fine record; both Tip and Phife were in interesting places and were rapping, in a formal sense, as well as ever, and the Dilla-led production is solid. The record’s uneven, but the highs are formidable. By contrast, Beats, Rhymes, and Life is steelier, more metallic than the original trilogy. It doesn’t reach Midnight Marauders’ highs or plunge to The Low End Theory’s depths. What could?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that line on “We Can Get Down” when Phife says “I be three albums deep, but I don’t wanna go pop.” They could have gone pop, fully pop. Tribe could have cranked out songs for blockbuster movie soundtracks and darted around the country in gold airplanes. But every time I think of that lyric, my mind jumps forward to “Da Booty,” from The Love Movement, when Phife is sitting on Letterman’s couch, sounding bored.

Those last two records got seven-and-a-half mics between them. Tip and Phife were never pariahs; there was just something missing. At their best, Tribe were master craftsmen, creative visionaries, brilliant songwriters—but something else was happening, too. Tribe was bound by a weird alchemy, the sort of thing that you feel in your bones but feel silly trying to articulate. There’s no good reason why “Skypager” feels like dark magic. But it does.

To go a step beyond that: There’s no monoculture anymore, but A Tribe Called Quest is as close as you can come to a point of consensus within the rap world. And yet as we’ve gotten further removed from Beats, Rhymes, and Life and The Love Movement, those two albums have become, weirdly, more maligned than they were on their release. (In addition to those four mics from The Source, Beats got a very positive review inRolling Stone, which only bristled at a stray use of the word “faggot.” Thank God Jive scrapped “Georgie Porgie.”) Where other creative breaks from popular rappers in the same period—think It Was Written, or the Buhloone Mindstate/Stakes Is High flip-flop—have become more heralded with the benefit of hindsight, Tribe’s two post-Marauders efforts have been relegated by history to the bargain bin.

All of this is to say that there are unseen forces trying to box Tribe into the early 1990s. Two pretty good records—and you could argue Beats is more than that—were deemed unacceptable. Tribe was hailed, even in the mid-’90s, as being not only great, but revolutionary; when the revolution took a left turn or allowed for a few Consequence verses, it was a bridge too far.

A reunion album has been teased over and over again for years, parceled out in neat headlines and cryptic magazine quotes. But if one of rap’s greatest groups—maybe the greatest—couldn’t last the first Clinton administration, how would it fare in the second?

I find it hard to blame Jimmy Fallon for ruffling Trump’s hair. I think that’s all he knows how to do. Did you remember Tribe rapping on Fallon the night of the Paris attacks? They’re one of the only acts in the world equipped to bring clarity in times of hopelessness, but there was only enough notice to have “Can I Kick It?” in tow. The performance was great, but planted—confirmed?—the worry that we’d only have Tribe through commemorative reissues. (Phife wore a Mets jacket. It’s the last time I remember seeing him.)

We Got It From Here is a towering achievement—and it would be a towering achievement even if you stripped it from its context, from Trump’s America. It’s a beautifully made rap album, full of vibrant vocals; the production is a smart synthesis of different threads Tribe perfected or inspired in the last three decades. Their skills haven’t atrophied at all; if this were made by a group of reckless 20-year-olds, we’d be hailing the second coming. Beyond their formal virtuosity, We Got It From Here taps back into that inarticulable witchcraft.

My favorite moment might be on “Dis Generation,” when Tip drops a nod to chemtrails, but does it casually, like they don’t bother him.

As for him being unbothered: His first verse on “We the People” is an absolute clinic. He’s slurring, then staccato; he’s sneering, then earnest, then looping back again. People keep talking about how timely this album, and in particular this song is. It’s true, of course—to a degree that can’t be overstated. But “We the People” wasn’t written and recorded in the 60 hours between the election being called and We Got It From Here popping up online. America has never been for the people listed in the chorus.

When Phife raps that he has “John Wall” status, he’s underselling himself.

“The Space Program,” too, could come from any year since Kennedy. And when Tip comes back in after Jarobi for the end of the first verse, rapping on the back half of the beat? Look: Q-Tip belongs on the shortest of short lists when we talk about the greatest artists in rap. The Tribe catalog, his solo work (shelved and otherwise), his comparatively slight but still devastating production discography. When he raps with Andre on “Kids…” it sounds like half of Mount Rushmore.

Speaking of Q-Tip productions, the only figure who can rival Donald Trump for press coverage right now is Kanye West. Great as My Beautiful Dark TwistedFantasy was, it could have used “Chain Heavy”: “For every inch they cut the nose off the Sphinx/I make my jeweler add a few more links.”

(N.B.- That moment at the end of his first verse on “Sucka Nigga,” when Q-Tip raps “I start to flinch, as I try not to say it” was a formative experience for me. Tip had just finished rapping so assuredly, making this multi-layered, historically informed defense of he and his peers using the n-word in their rhymes. Then it was all reduced—in the space of two seconds—to a slip of the tongue. I didn’t know adults had those sorts of internal lives.)

How did it take this long for someone to mix Kweli the way he’s mixed on “The Killing Season”? That’s the best he’s sounded since the day The Love Movement came out.

“Mobius” is great, but it really needs that Mobb Deep remix. Hell on Earth turned 20 last week, and I think there’s a critical takeaway from the proportional decline of rap groups among our most celebrated rap acts.

All the tributes to Phife are touching, from “Lost Somebody” to “The Donald” to the beautiful tapestry they unfurled on Saturday Night Live. But for some reason, the moment on We Got It From Here that hit me right in the gut was the beginning of “Movin Backwards,” when Jarobi raps “I hope my legendary style of rap lives on.” It makes me think of the mic passing that’s still heard on “Dis Generation,” it makes me think of the declarative, beaming kind of writing you use to make your friends laugh and nod their heads.

Is Tribe the only rap group where the DJ is the best-looking person?

The night they came back to late night TV—on SNL, with Dave Chappelle—I was coming home from seeing Lil Wayne play to tens of thousands of teenagers. Wayne had been roundly ridiculed for comments in a Nightline interview that seemed to be dismissive of Black Lives Matter. People found it strange, considering his years of work spent untangling the racist forces that led to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and Louisiana’s slow recovery. On stage, he praised the protesters who marched through downtown L.A. in protest of Trump; then he thanked God, yelled “Cash Money, suck my dick!” and threw his microphone a hundred feet in the air, and he was gone.

I pull into the garage, I walk into my apartment, which is already full of people. They’re watching SNL—specifically, they’re watching Tribe perform “We the People.” Tip slinks around the stage, more musclebound than you remember, in that red leather jacket. He raps about gentrification, about deportation. He and Jarobi point to the Phife tapestry, very nearly bringing him back to life. Someone gets up from the couch, says “Hi” to me, says: “I’m not really into this” and goes to grab a drink.

And that’s the point, right? For those of us who had half of We Got It From Here memorized the night it came out, Tribe is one of music’s most powerful unifying forces. A year after the Paris attacks, they came back to late-night TV with a cocktail of sorrow and righteous fury. But we might now be too fragmented, too irreparably tribal for any communication to cut across party lines.

Image via Douglas Gorenstein/NBC/Getty

There’s an artist from Warsaw named Piotr Uklanski. His first major work was an interactive dance floor, complete with LED lights and synchronized music on an endless loop. But his masterpiece is The Nazis, where row upon row of photographs—164 in total—show the handsome, often famous actors who portrayed Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, et al.

I saw The Nazis this past weekend, in Los Angeles. The couple beside me couldn’t help but draw parallels to our President-elect and his white-hooded inner circle. I suspect that’s the most common interpretation of Uklanski’s work: that through glossy retelling, the most grotesque parts of our collective history become normal, even seductive to some. (I watch a lot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.)

But there’s another way to look at The Nazis, one suggested by its neat and endless rows of headshots. One well-coiffed face can only smooth over evil for a minute; for the sting to really be diluted, you need a slow drip of mythmaking, parceled out year by year, film by film, row by row.

Evil has been doled out so efficiently in our time—and especially recently—that it’s simply, immovably, normal. Shrug and grab the tequila.

We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, like A Tribe Called Quest itself, is an argument that any act of rebellion—political, artistic, personal—is a worthy endeavor, whether it rattles around on Linden Boulevard or is broadcast into every living room in America.

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